


Slipping Away

by mneiai



Series: mneiai's Spooky Week [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Cannibalism, Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dehumanization, Implied Necrophilia, M/M, Magic, No Beta We Die Like Haat Mando'ade, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Obsessive Behavior, Possessive Behavior, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Undead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:40:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27193220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mneiai/pseuds/mneiai
Summary: Sometimes his soulmark had been the only thing that had kept Jango going--knowing that somewhere out there was his match: someone meant for him, someone who wouldn't find him too broken or useless.
Relationships: Jango Fett/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Series: mneiai's Spooky Week [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1985102
Comments: 30
Kudos: 269
Collections: Spooky Wars Week





	Slipping Away

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the first day of SpookyWars, the prompt is "Darkside Magic."
> 
> Myself and feybarn made a Discord server! [The Force's Favorite](https://discord.gg/YrsandN) is for dark stuff happening to Obi-Wan and being down to Obi-Wan! Basically it's just something dark...and Obi-Wan, of course haha
> 
> SpookyWars is going the whole week with daily prompts, if you'd be interested in participating, you can check it out [here](https://mneiai.tumblr.com/post/632824945757585408/spooky-wars-week).

Ever since he first caught sight of the Jedi, the rage that felt like Jango's oldest friend had been growing. Seeping up into his mind, filling in every gap, to the point he could barely think beyond the fight when it started. If the Jedi was holding back--that was because it wanted to question him or take him in (or enjoy itself by killing him slowly).

He did not think until it was gasping out its last breath, incongruous tears (that must have been from the pain) falling out of its eyes.

Only then did his rage go back to a simmer and did the _pain_ in his chest register.

He wasn't injured that badly--the Jedi hadn't made _any_ move to leave potentially serious wounds, even--so why did he hurt so much? Why did he feel as though he was being torn apart?

A Jedi trick? Some last minute magic used on him?

Something told him he _had_ to know. The hanger they were in was empty, sealed against outsiders, and no one would be interfering with a Jedi and a Mandalorian in the middle of a fight, regardless. Jango was safe enough to fumble off his armor--just enough to look at his chest and...the fading mark where once a vibrant soulmark had rested.

He sat there, watching more and more of the color leak away, not knowing how much time had passed before he could bring himself to check on _it_.

The Jedi's chest had the matching mark, still vibrant, captured and forever preserved at the very moment of death.

This wasn't--how could--

Jango lost track of time again, of the outside world.

When he could focus, he operated mostly on instinct. Gathering up the Jedi--no, not a Jedi, his _soulmate_ , for all the Jedi must have stolen them and tried to twist them into something else--in his arms ever so gently and stumbling back to his ship.

He went back to collect his armor and weapons and, though he didn't particular want it anywhere near him, his soulmate’s lightsaber.

That had never once hit him to injure.

Because his soulmate had known. Had been trying to tell him, surely, when he'd been refusing to listen to a word they said.

He'd killed his soulmate.

***

Having a soulmark was rare and precious. The Manda deemed someone worthy of a match, of a perfect person to be their partner through life and to march beside them into death, and that was honored by all Mandalorians, even by Death Watch itself.

Sometimes his soulmark had been the only thing that had kept Jango going--knowing that somewhere out there was his match: someone meant for him, someone who wouldn’t find him too broken or useless.

In the darkest days of slavery, he would press a hand to his chest and _endure_ so that someday he could meet them.

***

Jango worked with bodies enough on bounties to know exactly how quickly they started to degrade. His motions were practiced and precise, but he'd never placed a bounty in stasis as gently as he did his soulmate.

He'd taken them out of the Jedi clothing, placed them in loose sleepwear of his. It might be the only time he ever got to see such a thing and he _needed_ to.

His soulmate's name, according to the identification in a belt pocket when he went through them (and he knew, somehow, that it wasn't a false ID) was Obi-Wan Kenobi. He was, of course, from Coruscant, though he had citizenship to some backwater planet called Melida/Daan, as well.

He was twenty-two. It was the same age Jango had been, on Galidraan. When he'd felt like his life was ending.

Maybe the Manda was just that cruel.

***

He kept the body. He should have given it the proper rites, he knew, but he worried that Obi-Wan would not join the Manda. That wherever Jedi went, Jango could not follow. 

This body might be all he had left of him, all he could see, all he could touch.

On a particularly bad night, when he once more had to drink himself to sleep, his dreams were a swirling mix of his old home on Concord Dawn, his old family and friends, and of the True Mandalorians under Jaster. Of sitting around fires telling scary stories to each other, trying to impress, trying to get bragging rights for making someone show just how scared they were.

When he woke up, unsettled, with a shroud of old fear lying over his shoulders, his mind circled around just one single scene. An old tale of Mandalorians bringing their loved ones back from the dead.

Jango stopped doing much of anything but _searching_ , seeking out the mystics still alive among the diaspora, tearing his way through Death Watch camps to question their sorcerers.

The single person he found who knew more than just the story begged him to reconsider, claimed it was for his own good, but Jango ignored them. What did they know?

Three years after his soulmate died (just as it had been three years for him, after Galidraan, before he freed himself), he found the old Temple. Ruined, as so much of Manda'yaim was, by the Dral'han, somehow the altars at the very center were still intact.

Carefully, so carefully, he placed Obi-Wan on the central one. And then began to off-load the other bodies, still living, and place them on the others.

It was so hard to hunt Jedi and _keep them alive_ , but he knew when he found out about the sacrifices that Jedi were the only ones that would do. To purge their influence from Obi-Wan, to free him from whatever hell they went to when they died.

As soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, he started.

***

Obi-Wan had heard many stories of what it was like to become One with the Force, but he'd never had overmuch interest in them. The Force was everything, in everything, aware of everything, and being One with it was only natural.

There were no stories for being _torn away_ from the Force. Of the sudden return to individuality, to the realization of self.

To being stripped of the peace and serenity that the Force and everyone and everything in it had brought.

He screamed through a dry, so dry throat, body remembering how to thrash even if he didn't really recall what it was like to move a body.

Touch came back first. Something cold and hard underneath him. Something warm and tacky covering him. Strong...hands, he realized. Strong hands holding him.

Beyond that was sound, which was little but the panting breath of another above him, blowing against his face as mumbled words--Mando'a, he vaguely recognized, as he began to understand again what languages were.

Taste was bitter copper, and sight...that came last. He stared into a face he didn't recognize, but felt like he should. Wild, dark eyes stared into his as if searching for something.

The Force, his constant companion for what might have been centuries, slipped through his touch, just beyond his reach.

"Obi-Wan?" The name--his own name--sounded just a little wrong, as though the person was pronouncing it differently than they should have been.

"Wha?" It didn’t exactly hurt to talk, he wasn’t feeling any pain, but the dryness of his throat and what felt like such little air in his lungs made it next to impossible.

The person fumbled with something at their side, then a container was pressed to Obi-Wan's lips and he was drinking, drinking. It was bitter and thick, but so, so good.

Some of the confusion left him, the world around them starting to become clearer.

He froze at the first mangled body he saw, horribly following tracks of blood to another, then another, and he was almost certain more were just outside of his range of vision.

Blood that the person holding him up with one arm, all-but cuddling him, was covered in. That _Obi-Wan_ was covered in....That the cup he'd been drinking from had been filled with.

That knowledge filled him with fear, but not disgust, even though he knew it should have.

"It's alright, ne'runi, you're alright."

They were both naked, the cool night air not making Obi-Wan shiver despite that. On the other's chest was a familiar outline--one he'd seen everyday in the mirror when he'd looked. But where his own soulmark was brilliant blues and greens, this was a deep, deep black, as if it was sucking the light out of the area around it.

He didn't want to, he knew he shouldn't, but as soon as the other let him go--to do what, Obi-Wan didn't think he wanted to know--he looked down at his own chest. At the black, black mark marring his too-pale skin.

"You'll be hungry, I know," the other--his soulmate?--was saying now, dragging Obi-Wan's attention back to him. "There's enough here, but we'll find more, fresher ones."

‘Enough of what?’ he almost asked, but it was hard to miss the other dragging one of the bodies towards him.

They were vaguely familiar, despite the runes carved into their skin, the way anyone who grew up in the Temple was. All of the bodies he could see were the same.

Jedi. His soulmate had killed Jedi.

...His soulmate had killed other Jedi, before that. He could remember it now, that tug that had drawn him away from the mission (Qui-Gon hadn't needed his help, anyway) and towards the spaceport. That had made him hold back and try to reason with the Mandalorian he'd been connected to, who ached with such hatred it was nearly a wound in the Force.

Who had killed him.

Obi-Wan had been _dead_.

"What did you do?"

"I'm sorry," the Mandalorian breathed out, dropping the body infront of him and pulling him into another embrace. "I didn't know, I didn't think. But I'll make it all up to you, I promise."

He tried to take a deep breath, but his lungs barely worked, just enough air getting in to help him speak.

Looking down at himself, he could see only pale, lifeless skin. It looked cold, though he couldn't feel the temperature of it. He was in his own body.

His own dead body.

Shuddering, he tried to pull away again. "Please, let me go, let me stay dead. I was one with the Force. Let me return!"

His words made the Mandalorian angry. Even without being able to sense emotions, Obi-Wan could tell. Their bond was lit with it, not the way it had been as it was first forming during their fight, but with rage directed _elsewhere_.

"The Jedi tried to steal you. They can't anymore. You belong to the Manda, now, as you always should have."

The body was shoved in front of him, the Mandalorian careless with it as though it really was just the meat he was treating it as. Something inside of Obi-Wan, a gnawing hunger that had never been there before, not even while he was starving in the barren fields of Manda’yaim or the sewers of Melida/Daan, took immediate interest.

He watched as if no longer trapped inside his body as his hands reached out and grabbed an arm, dragging it up to his mouth.

Distantly, he was aware of the Mandalorian--he didn’t even know his _name_ \--stroking his hair, murmuring praise as if Obi-Wan was his pet. Stroking lower, more intimately, as if Obi-Wan was a possession. 

And all he could do was eat, body unwilling to let him stop even long enough to push the other away.

**Author's Note:**

> ne'runi is from ner runi, which is "my soul" using the poetic form of soul


End file.
